Tag Archives: Adam Mac

by Adam Mac

A long way away—1.185185 quadrillion light years, give or take a billion or two—on an asteroid belt nicknamed the Frigid Lace, the world was populated by nucleosaurs and electrosaurs. [NB: Protosaurs are a strictly human construct as proved by Poodlesky. Ed.]

One such nucleosaur was Stanley Nucleosaurus, Esq. As a nucleosaur, Stanley had a following, so to speak–in his orbit, so to speak again. They were called electrosaurs, or electrosaurus cum minimus negativus, and basically they were servants, but for Stanley they were primarily snacks.

Stanley constantly snacked on his electrosaurs. This had the predictable consequence of Stanley often turning himself into something else. After a couple of electrosaurs, he’d take on the properties of, say, “Strontium saurus” or “Plutoniumsaurus” or something more exotic. A dozen once transformed him into a flatugenic facsimile of himself and a double double turned him inside out into Defecatorium saurus.

You’d think this would all come to a quick end what with Stanley’s infinite appetite and his finite number of electrosaurs, but it didn’t. So far, we’ve only mentioned his internal consumption, but for every electrosaur he gobbled he consumed two nucleosaurs. This raised Stanley’s electrosaur count to dangerously high levels and challenged scientists to scramble for names, like “Ican’tbelieveIatethewholethingium” or “YikesIthinkIgotabadoneonium.”

All this took its toll on the Frigid Lace. Stanley munched his way from one end of the asteroid belt to the other, devouring everything in sight and leaving behind great clumps of antimatter and clouds of noxious quasar gas. So much had Stanley grown—Giganticus Infinitus Pacmanicus—that astronomers could track his movements as he galumphed acrossed the asteriods as if they were stones in a stream.

Eventually, as the external supply of consumables was depleted, Stanley had to turn exclusively to consuming his own electrosaurs. Long predicted by dark-cloud scientists, Stanley then achieved the first documented interstellar case of absolute subjective annihilation. Id est, he ate himself up.

by Adam Mac

I had lived a sheltered life. Windows always open, wholesome fragrances everywhere, and I buzzed in and out of the house at will. Best were the apple pies that cooled on the kitchen table. The madam playfully swatted at me and chased me around knowing full well she’d never get me in a room with 10-foot ceilings.

Then one day, horror struck. I found my family strung up on one of those sticky strips, stuck there unmoving in gruesome, contorted positions. I’d never noticed it before, but my younger brother had seven legs.

I hopped the first outsider who was going far away–I hoped. Turns out, he only made it to the first stop on the interstate before he had to relieve himself. I was tired and disoriented, so I just buzzed around his cap, but when he made to leave I was prevented by a strong downdraft of air at the door. We parted ways and I got to know my new surroundings.

People, always men, came in waves. When it was slack, young boys would come in and horse around. “I can hit it from way back here,” one would say, and the other would wager a small bet. Most of the time, men would stand as far apart as possible, but sometimes you’d get a guy who’d come a little too close. I watched and listened.

It took getting used to what I thought was my punishment for having survived. (I’d learned all about guilt in Sunday School.) The smells weren’t like momma’s apple pie, but they were strangely attractive in a primal sort of way, and I felt a side of me emerge which might have frightened me once. Towards dark—the crickets told me—a large fellow in a black Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirt barreled into a stall. I followed. I didn’t come out for hours. If this was purgatory, I could skip heaven.

by Adam Mac

In the current Journal of Statistical Probability in Law Enforcement, Viktor Schmerdloff proposes the original theory that there are two types of people: those who fold their toilet paper and those who scrunch it up.

Anticipating skeptics, Schmerdloff explains why the FBI should be interested in profiling folders and scrunchers. Folders, he maintains, are inherently dangerous since they are fastidious in their planning and methodical in execution. When combined with other threat indicators, folding can provide reliable predictive data, which more often than not results in successful intervention and apprehension of suspects.

On the other hand, scrunchers, though percentage-wise less of a threat, can be worrisome insofar as their recklessness and aversion to normative behavior makes them unpredictable and virtually impossible to combat. The very absence of orderliness frustrates traditional law enforcement professionals and warrants new and controversial techniques like chaos profiling.

A unified approach targeting both folders and scrunchers is recommended, since they are, in effect, two heads of the same monster.

Regarding the operational issue of collecting data, the agency can work closely with manufacturers to install and retrofit millions of door locks in public restrooms with tiny hidden cameras. These cameras will generate continuous and multi-synchronous CCTV feeds for the agency’s super computer in northern Nevada to analyze and prioritize.

We think Schmerdloff’s proposal is a good first step but would add that profiling should further segregate those who don’t flush from those who do and among those who do flush it should separate out those who flush with their hands from those who flush with their feet. Since both folders and scrunchers are suspect, additional data are required to distinguish between actual, probable, and possible threats.

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Posted onFebruary 8, 2014|Comments Off on In The Beginning We Did Have Someone On The Ground

Roaches. We were simply called “roaches,” though perhaps even then we should have been called “cockroaches.” Our tradition is that only the male figures into historical accounts. The progenitor of our species, Ed, lived googolgoogol generations ago. In the beginning, he was there in the Garden of Eden, notwithstanding the apocryphal accounts of people.

In the garden, Ed hovered about openly on the lookout for crumbs and dribbles. Back then, there were no cupboards to hide in and no sudden bright lights to skitter away from. And we weren’t afflicted with the demeaning stereotype propagated by bigoted speciesists, like K. So, in the beginning, Adam and Eve were pretty relaxed with Ed around, and Ed, for his part, was usually pretty good about not crawling on their naked bodies when they were following God’s detailed instructions on how to make Cain and Abel.